Dr. Daniel E Miller

Dr. Daniel E. Miller, professor of history, teaches courses in modern Europe, Europe between the world wars, Central Europe, East-Central Europe, Balkans, Russia, the Soviet Union, Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, the European Union, and agricultural history.

Raised in a Slovak household, Miller was immersed in Slovak and Czech history and culture. He was fascinated with how the Czechoslovak First Republic (1918-1938) was democratic and then, after the Second World War, became communist. Over the years, his work has explored Czechoslovak democracy between the world wars as a consociational democracy and interwar Czechoslovak agrarian politics, including how land reform supports democracy.

Miller has published numerous articles and chapters, both in Czech and in English, on Slovak and Czech agricultural politics and democracy in the Czechoslovak First Republic. He is currently collaborating with two other scholars on a book about consociationalism (a model of democratic power sharing) in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Czechoslovak First Republic. He is working on a monograph detailing the creation of new agricultural settlements on land obtained from the great estates, during the Czechoslovak land reform between the World Wars. He also is editing a volume of memoirs of American historians who researched in communist-controlled Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1989.

In 1999, Miller wrote, Forging Political Compromise: Antonín Švehla and the Czechoslovak Republican Party (1918-1933), a book that focuses on agrarian politics and democracy in Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars. Czech historians voted the Czech translation of this book on Antonín Švehla the best historical work of 2001 (tied with one other) by a foreign author. He coedited a book on agricultural politics (in Czech) and wrote a short monograph on Czech public opinion about the European Union between 2003 and 2013. Miller also published 15 articles, in Czech and English, and one coauthored article.

Miller, who has been in the UWF history department since 1990, was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 1989 to 1990. He has made numerous research trips to East-Central Europe, particularly the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and he has traveled throughout Europe.